Philippine archipelago in the context of "Geology of the Philippines"

The culture of the Philippines is characterized by great ethnic diversity. Although the multiple ethnic groups of the Philippine archipelago have only recently established a shared Filipino national identity, their cultures were all shaped by the geography and history of the region, and by centuries of interaction with neighboring cultures, and colonial powers. In more recent times, Filipino culture has also been influenced through its participation in the global community.

Filipino (English: /ˌfɪlɪˈpiːnoʊ/ FIL-ih-PEE-noh; Wikang Filipino [ˈwikɐŋ filiˈpino]) is the national language of the Philippines, the main lingua franca, and one of the two official languages of the country, along with English. It is a de facto standardized form of the Tagalog language, as spoken and written in Metro Manila and in other urban centers of the archipelago. The 1987 Constitution mandates that Filipino be further enriched and developed by the other languages of the Philippines.

Filipino, like other Austronesian languages, commonly uses verb-subject-object order, but can also use subject-verb-object order. Filipino follows the trigger system of morphosyntactic alignment that is common among Philippine languages. It has head-initial directionality. It is an agglutinative language but can also display inflection. It is not a tonal language and can be considered a pitch-accent language and a syllable-timed language. It has nine basic parts of speech.

In the geology of the Philippines, the Philippine Mobile Belt is a complex portion of the tectonic boundary between the Eurasian plate and the Philippine Sea plate, comprising most of the Philippine archipelago. It includes two subduction zones, the Manila Trench to the west and the Philippine Trench to the east, as well as the Philippine fault system. Within the Belt, a number of crustal blocks or microplates which have been shorn off the adjoining major plates are undergoing massive deformation.

Most segments of the Philippines, including northern Luzon, are part of the Philippine Mobile Belt, which is bounded by the Philippine Sea plate to the east, the Molucca Sea Collision Zone to the south, Sunda plate to the southwest, and the South China Sea Basin to the west and north-west. To the north it ends in eastern Taiwan, the zone of active collision between the North Luzon Trough portion of the Luzon Volcanic Arc and South China. The Philippine Mobile Belt has also been called the Philippine Microplate and the Taiwan–Luzon–Mindoro Belt.

Islam in the Philippines is the second largest religion in the country, and the faith was the first-recorded monotheistic religion in the Philippines. Historically, Islam reached the Philippine archipelago in the 14th century, through contact with Muslim Malay and Arab merchants along Southeast Asian trade networks, in addition to Yemeni missionaries from the tribe of Ba 'Alawi sada of Yemen from the Persian Gulf, southern India, and their followers from several sultanates in the wider Malay Archipelago. The first Sunni Sufi missionaries then followed in the late 14th and early 15th centuries. They facilitated the formation of sultanates and conquests in mainland Mindanao and Sulu. Those who converted to Islam came to be known as the Moros, with Muslim conquest reaching as far as Tondo that was later supplanted by Bruneian Empire vassal-state of Maynila.

Muslim sultanates had already begun expanding in the central Philippines by the 16th century, when the Spanish fleet led by Ferdinand Magellan arrived. The Spanish referred to Muslim inhabitants of the Philippines as "Moros," after the Muslim "Moors" they had regarded with disdain in Iberia and the Maghreb. The subsequent Spanish conquest led to Catholic Christianity becoming the predominant religion in most of the modern-day Philippines, with Islam becoming a significant minority religion.

Maynila, also known commonly as Manila and as the Rajahnate of Maynila, was a major Tagalog bayan ("country" or "city-state") situated along the modern-day district of Intramuros in the city of Manila, at the southern bank of the Pasig River. It was considered to be one of the most cosmopolitan of the early historic settlements on the Philippine archipelago, fortified with a wooden palisade which was appropriate for the predominant battle tactics of its time. At the northern bank of the river lies the separately-led polity of Tondo.

Maynila was led by paramount rulers who were referred to using the Malay title of "Raja". Maynila is sometimes interpreted to be the Kingdom of Luzon, although some historians suggest that this might rather refer to the Manila Bay region as a whole, expanding the possible dominion of the kingdom.

Datu is a title which denotes the rulers (variously described in historical accounts as chiefs, sovereign princes, and monarchs) of numerous indigenous peoples throughout the Philippine archipelago. The title is still used today, though not as much as early Philippine history. It is a cognate of datuk, dato, and ratu in several other Austronesian languages.